It is abundantly clear by now that in the realm of presidential contests, we are in uncharted waters. Against a highly competent candidate with decades of political experience, a stint in the Senate, a stint in the key Cabinet post and another stint in the White House (as First Lady) — against all this, we have a kind of bizarro plutocrat who, when it comes to public service, has not even held the post of dog catcher. Ideologically, the one candidate occupies a spot somewhere between the center-left and progressive factions of the Democratic party; on the other side of the aisle, we have a nativist with a proto-authoritarian view of the executive branch and a stunning hostility to a wide variety of social “others” — women, people of color, immigrants, Muslims. Clinton’s political affiliations are to various figures within the progressive and establishment wings of the Democratic party mainstream; Trump’s connections are to a ragtag contingent of extremist groups, from the Men’s Rights set and Alt-Right to outright white supremacist groups.
Beyond these stunningly unprecedented differences in profile, we could point to the extraordinarily different ways that the two candidates have comported themselves throughout the campaign. While Clinton has pursued a conventional approach — connecting to the party’s base during the primaries, and building upon that coalition in the general, through the usual mixture of speeches, rallies, political ads, and the like — Trump has engaged in what up till very recently was an off-the-cuff, seat-of-the-pants campaign driven by Twitter shock value and countless hours of free media time, granted to him in expectation of yet further shock value. His campaign during the primary was a highly successful attempt to seize the party’s rabid base, and he has not diverted from that course in the general, making yet further appeals to the rabid base, while throwing in the odd token “outreach” for good measure.
Given all this, and given that we have scarcely seen its like before in modern presidential politics...why does all this seem eerily familiar?
It is in large part because of the media. We have all rehearsed at length the myriad reasons why the media attacks on Clinton are familiar: they are familiar because she’s been attacked incessantly before, dating all the way back to her husband’s time as governor of Arkansas. They’re familiar, too, because we saw something similar unfold in the 2000 election, with the media — unaccountably — hammering away at the more intelligent and knowledgeable of the two candidates, while his frat-boy opponent got a pass. Eric Alterman made the case a number of years ago that the campaign’s efforts to cater to the media varied considerably — Bush’s team engaged in a kind of charm offensive, with multiple relaxed media availabilities, sumptuous catering (lobster rolls!), and a generally aggressive effort to meet the material needs of a political press increasingly inclined to be pampered. By contrast, Gore was not as assertive on that front… and his press gaggle was largely given tuna sandwiches. If you can believe it, the kingdom was lost for lack of lobster rolls(!).
All of this focuses mostly on Clinton, and on her resemblance not only to her own past media treatment — with all of its misogynist double standards — but also to the likes of Gore and Kerry and their skeptical treatment by a press determined to be “evenhanded.”
But the media approach to Bush is an important precedent, too. For those of us who came to an awareness of US politics in the late 1990s, the arrival of Bush on the scene anticipated many aspects of the sudden and baffling arrival of Trump: yet another political lightweight, with a thin grasp of policy, some shady affiliations (ie., in Bush’s case, with Dominionist theocrats and Straussian neocons), and a tendency to say precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time.
The media environment of the post-August presidential campaign of 2016 resembles, to my mind, nothing so closely as the media environment that attended the Bush administration in the run up to the war in Iraq. I to this day remember where I was when I first heard that the administration was floating that insane idea: I was driving my beat up 1994 Tercel along Sunset Boulevard in Santa Monica (always a humbling and demoralizing experience), when some mild-mannered and credulous anchor on NPR gently informed us that Bush was going to go after Iraq as a threat to the United States.
I remember this moment for the loud string of cuss words that I shouted, with great futility, at the indifferent voice coming out of my car speakers. To paraphrase Lewis Black — because I had basically the same experience — I was just sitting on my fuckin’ couch, and even I knew that the rationale for war was bullshit. I knew it, because nothing that had transpired thus far in the history of the Bush administration gave me any evidence to suggest that this was anything other than an effort to find a nation-state scapegoat for a war that should have been levied exclusively against non-state actors. The secular Baathist regime in Baghdad — as hideous as it was — had nothing to gain from throwing its lot in with a cluster of extremist Wahabi theocrats, bent on destroying the West. I just knew that this was going to be a situation where a Potemkin village of a war rationale was going to be propped up to serve the ideological purpose of the Bush administration. It had already happened in several non-military contexts, where this or that measure on women’s reproductive freedoms was implemented less out of any policy goal than as red meat thrown to the base. The era of Bush was the era of the permanent, unrelenting political campaign, with every policy measure enacted strictly for what it would do to secure Bush’s next electoral coalition.
But the mainstream media at this time didn’t see things this way. The atrocities of 9/11, to be sure, had secured Bush an enormous amount of political capital, and leeway to maneuver, to do things that he wouldn’t ordinarily be able to do. But what it meant, too, was that the Bush administration was credited with an intelligence, and a good faith commitment to the public’s best interests, that wasn’t there in reality. Ron Suskind, in an astonishingly postmodern moment, was told by an unnamed “senior administration official” (probably Karl Rove) that we in the “reality-based community” could look forward to the administration creating a new reality on our behalf:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
This was an extraordinary moment of hubris in the recent history of the Presidency. Here was a representative of the most powerful office in the world boldly and arrogantly telling a member of the fourth estate that the President was no longer accountable to them, but that they were simply to be passive recipients of whatever new realities were offered by “history’s actors,” by the imperial agents of the executive branch.
That pretty much set the tone for the way the MSM treated the Bush administration at that time. Apart from a couple of important exceptions — Helen Thomas, pretty much — we would almost invariably refer to the White House press corps as the White House “stenography pool,” a cluster of access-besotted journalists who were prepared to uncritically channel the press releases of the administration in order to keep their sources happy.
The resulting atmosphere was surreal in the extreme. New York Times articles that regularly treated the famously fumble-mouthed frat boy in the Oval office as if he had genuine political convictions or understandings of policy. CNN coverage that framed the most inane press statements by Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, et al. as ordinary policymaking of the most mundane variety.
It seems to me that this is why the Trump coverage seems so extraordinarily familiar to me. We are getting this weird disconnect between the contempt that Trump directs towards the press on the one hand, and the congenial reception of this hostility on the press’s part, on the other. There is a disconnect between the actual content-free inanity of Trump’s “policies,” all of them promising a massively ambitious goal with no plan to realize it — “I’m gonna build X, it’ll be the biggest X you’ve ever seen, it’ll be tremendous, believe me” — a massive disconnect between that and the media’s efforts to credit him with a normal grasp of policy. So many interviews with Chuck Todd or Anderson Cooper staring soberly into Trump’s eyes and watching him spout utter insanity; there are so many such moments because the media doesn’t really know what to do with it. Just like they didn’t know what to do with the fumble-mouthed ignorance of George W. Bush, or with the lunatic idea of invading a country that had absolutely no part in the atrocities that the invasion was ostensibly designed to remedy.
This is what we’re up against. And what frightens me is that we saw how all this worked out last time. The press is ready to sacrifice the stability of American democratic institutions themselves in order to preserve some arcane notion of political “balance” — or, more precisely, to treat whatever candidate they’re talking to with a good faith belief in their seriousness as a candidate.